We propose a novel collapsed variational Bayes (CVB) inference for the hierarchical Dirichlet process (HDP). While the existing CVB inference for the HDP variant of latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is more complicated and harder to implement than that for LDA, the proposed algorithm is simple to implement, does not require variance counts to be maintained, does not need to set hyper-parameters, and has good predictive performance.

We develop a deterministic single-pass algorithm for latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) in order to process received documents one at a time and then discard them in an excess text stream. Our algorithm does not need to store old statistics for all data. The proposed algorithm is much faster than a batch algorithm and is comparable to the batch algorithm in terms of perplexity in experiments.

We introduce a new class of "maximization-expectation" (ME) algorithms where we maximize over hidden variables but marginalize over random parameters. This reverses the roles of expectation and maximization in the classical expectation-maximization algorithm. In the context of clustering, we argue that these hard assignments open the door to very fast implementations based on data structures such as kd-trees and conga lines. The marginalization over parameters ensures that we retain the ability to infer model structure (i.e., number of clusters). As an important example, we discuss a top-down Bayesian k-means algorithm and a bottom-up agglomerative clustering algorithm. In experiments, we compare these algorithms against a number of alternative algorithms that have recently appeared in the literature.

Graph data such as chemical compounds and XML documents are getting more common in many application domains. A main difficulty of graph data processing lies in the intrinsic high dimensionality of graphs, namely, when a graph is represented as a binary feature vector of indicators of all possible subgraph patterns, the dimensionality gets too large for usual statistical methods. We propose a nonparametric Bayesian method for clustering graphs and selecting salient patterns at the same time. Variational inference is adopted here, because sampling is not applicable due to extremely high dimensionality. The feature set minimizing the free energy is efficiently collected with the DFS code tree, where the generation of useless subgraphs is suppressed by a tree pruning condition. In experiments, our method is compared with a simpler approach based on frequent subgraph mining, and graph kernels.

A wide variety of Dirichlet-multinomial ‘topic’ models have found interesting ap- plications in recent years. While Gibbs sampling remains an important method of inference in such models, variational techniques have certain advantages such as easy assessment of convergence, easy optimization without the need to maintain detailed balance, a bound on the marginal likelihood, and side-stepping of issues with topic-identifiability. The most accurate variational technique thus far, namely collapsed variational latent Dirichlet allocation, did not deal with model selection nor did it include inference for hyperparameters. We address both issues by gen- eralizing the technique, obtaining the first variational algorithm to deal with the hierarchical Dirichlet process and to deal with hyperparameters of Dirichlet vari- ables. Experiments show a significant improvement in accuracy.

Dirichlet Process (DP) mixture models are promising candidates for clustering applications where the number of clusters is unknown a priori. Due to compu- tational considerations these models are unfortunately unsuitable for large scale data-mining applications. We propose a class of deterministic accelerated DP mixture models that can routinely handle millions of data-cases. The speedup is achieved by incorporating kd-trees into a variational Bayesian algorithm for DP mixtures in the stick-breaking representation, similar to that of Blei and Jordan (2005). Our algorithm differs in the use of kd-trees and in the way we handle truncation: we only assume that the variational distributions are fixed at their pri- ors after a certain level. Experiments show that speedups relative to the standard variational algorithm can be significant.

We introduce a new class of “maximization expectation” (ME) algorithms where we maximize over hidden variables but marginalize over random parameters. This reverses the roles of expectation and maximization in the classical EM algorithm. In the context of clustering, we argue that the hard assignments from the maximization phase open the door to very fast implementations based on data-structures such as kd-trees and conga-lines. The marginalization over parameters ensures that we retain the ability to select the model structure. As an important example we discuss a top-down “Bayesian k-means” algorithm and a bottomup agglomerative clustering algorithm. In experiments we compare this algorithm against a number of alternative algorithms that have recently appeared in the literature.